You’ve just had a baby boy! You’ve brought him home from the hospital, you’re getting into that routine of late night feedings and too frequent diaper changes, and you think, “Hmmm. What this situation really needs is for someone to take a pair of scissors to this little rascal’s penis.” I don’t get it. But apparently, home circumcisions are a thing, and there are “professionals” (using the term loosely) who are so committed to their hobby of chopping up baby penises that they’ll resign from regular work to commit to the practice.

As part of the BBC investigation, an actor phoned up Dr Siddiqui and asked him to conduct a home circumcision on their baby. He agreed, in direct contravention of his GMC ban. Since then, and after discovering he had been exposed by the BBC,  Dr Siddiqui has resigned from his NHS job. The astonishing consequence of that resignation is that it now allows him to resume conducting circumcisions, which it appears he fully intends to do.

Yes, you did read that correctly. Circumcisions are completely unregulated in the UK, and anyone – you, me or the local barber – can set up a business cutting off baby boy’s foreskins at a hundred quid a pop.  Any doctor under the employ of the NHS, however, is bound to the regulation of the GMC and the Quality and Care Commission. A circumcision conducted in a hospital, with anaesthetic and surgical implements is carefully controlled and subject to monitoring and audit. A circumcision conducted on a kitchen table or in a community centre is completely unregulated. There are more regulations surrounding the piercing of an ear than the surgical amputation of a foreskin.

Weird. You know, if a guy made a habit of going around kissing baby penises, he’d be locked up on the spot, but add some sharp knives and olive oil to the process, and suddenly it becomes an honored and respected traditional folk practice that must be allowed to continue without interference.

The lesson is never learned. MPR is running a local story on a St Paul parish which was afflicted with another of those perambulating pedophile priests. Curtis Wehmeyer was a known sexual predator to the Catholic church, and they sent him to St Paul and didn’t tell any of the locals.

Curtis Wehmeyer kept his white 2006 camper parked outside Blessed Sacrament Church in St. Paul where he served for six years, three of them as pastor.

With the shades drawn, Wehmeyer could avoid the obligations of priestly life. He got drunk, smoked pot and looked at child pornography. He also lured to the camper two boys whose mother worked at the parish, plied them with alcohol, turned on pornography and told them to touch themselves. Several times, he touched one of the boys, according to police records.

The family trusted "Father Curt." As a priest, he had special powers. He could anoint the sick and baptize the young. Maybe, the mother hoped, he could inspire one of her sons to become a priest.

Why would anyone want their child to become a priest?

The St Paul/Minneapolis archdiocese had a “delegate for a safe environment” who actually wrote a letter concluding that he would “recommend against any disclosure in his workplace” — apparently, “safe environment” means safe for priests, because they did a remarkably good job covering for a nasty man who was exploiting the children of his parish. The coverup has been unambiguously documented in a memo posted at the link.

Thomas Doyle, a Dominican priest who was one of the earliest national whistleblowers on clergy sex abuse in the 1980s, said the memo shows that parents cannot trust the archdiocese to protect their children.

“Celibate clergy who aren’t trained in psychology are in no position to make that kind of a judgment call over someone like Wehmeyer,” he said.

Yet they all assume that their training in theology, or perhaps it is their imaginary direct line to a god, gives them the expertise to be counselors, psychologists, and therapists. It does not. These people are quacks and frauds who let a child molester have access to children for a decade — and even now they’re unapologetic about it.